Enabling Technologies Don't Show Up in Aggregate Job Numbers

The AI job displacement story is compelling. The data is more complicated.

Every generation has a technology that was supposed to eliminate jobs on a massive scale. When I was young it was personal computers. Then the web. The same predictions were made each time, complete with experts showing chart after chart of downwardly sloping job lines. These days, it’s AI that’s going to lead to massive job displacement. It sounds true, it feels true, but the data paints a more complicated story.

Last week, Gad Levanon at The Burning Glass Institute published a careful, data-grounded piece arguing that generative AI is already displacing workers at a structural level, not a cyclical one. He makes a serious case and it’s an important read. https://lnkd.in/e2U3Pd44

But it’s important to recognize that no enabling technology has shown up in aggregate job numbers. Not once in forty years.

This chart shows forty years of Federal Reserve employment data across all non-military occupations. Look at the orange knowledge worker line at the top. It rises steadily through every wave of technology, every recession, every moment someone said this time is different. You cannot find the internet, Google, Web 2.0, cloud computing, smartphones, or Blockchain. What you see instead is a steady, uninterrupted rise in work that requires judgment and problem-solving.

Is AI upending software engineering jobs? Absolutely. Is AI changing how people work? No doubt. Is it accelerating the automation of routine tasks? Without question. But if AI follows all prior patterns of enabling technology, it’s going to both displace and expand tasks. And I do see evidence that AI is displacing jobs. Gad makes a strong case for this (although its worth noting that a lot of this displacement looks like acceleration of long-standing trends rather than something new).

Past conversations about job displacement missed the new jobs that were quietly being created. Which is why we haven’t seen mass job displacement from prior enabling technologies.